Content Marketing

That’s the old saying isn’t it? “Why buy a cow when you can get the milk for free?” Or applied to marketing your services, why would clients hire you when they can get information from you for free (perhaps via your content marketing or detailed proposals)? Have you heard those horror stories about prospective clients … Read more…

I believe I may have a few things in common with the multi-Grammy winning producer Mutt Lange. And of course, we have a few differences too. He, for example, has written songs and produced albums for AC/DC, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Michael Bolton, The Cars, Bryan Adams, Huey Lewis and the News, Billy Ocean, Maroon 5, Lady … Read more…

Another day, another mega-successful startup takes my content marketing advice. Yeah, I’m kidding. Baremetrics has probably never heard of me, but they’ve adopted what I consider a best practice for content marketing. That is the education resource center. Theirs looks like this: There are three important things going on here. 1) Value anchoring By using … Read more…

I’m sure you know that I’m a huge fan of email marketing because of its potential to scale trust-building. I use my own email list as a bit of a laboratory. I’m always trying to find ways to deliver more value. I’m also interested in how my email list performs over time from a marketing perspective. … Read more…

Following on to the Minimum Viable Funnel article, I’d like to drill into each component of the funnel. Today, let’s look at lead magnets. As a refresher, remember that my Minimum Viable Funnel looks like this: Promotional activity (like teaching) –> Lead magnet –> 3 months of “lead nurture” emails that are constantly reminding subscribers … Read more…

The question “how do I use content marketing to benefit my professional services business” comes up a lot. If you Google that exact query string, you’ll get a lot of useless advice. Advice on the benefits of content marketing. Reasons why you should do it, even if you’re a small services business. Listicles with 59 … Read more…

I just finished reviewing Dan Norris’ new book Content Machine. This is one of the better books I’ve read on content marketing, and it’s chock full of good advice on how to do excellent B2B content marketing. In particular, his chapter 4 on differentiating your voice is excellent. Here’s the problem I see with Dan’s advice: I … Read more…

You can listen to this post instead of reading it: Or… you can read it: In my coaching and consulting work, I’ve encountered several situations where my client sees the benefit of building a list but feels quite nervous about putting themselves out there by writing content for a list. I have an idea that … Read more…

This article won’t be very actionable. You’ll be tempted to skip it, which would be a huge mistake. You’ll be tempted to skip it because planning a successful content marketing campaign is hard stuff. It seems much easier and more productive to get busy writing some blog articles. But without a good plan, any effort … Read more…

It’s kind of a lot, but there are some important jobs that have to be done on a lead-generation site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/ Because broken links suck. (Edit: my WordPress expert buddies tell me to disable this except when needed because it breaks stuff.) https://wordpress.org/plugins/404page/ lets me create a custom 404 error page with valuable resources and … Read more…